


My Blue Heaven

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-03-15
Updated: 2001-03-15
Packaged: 2018-11-20 13:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11336202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: My answer to the question, "What if Scully knew all along that Mulder is attracted to men?"





	My Blue Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

My Blue Heaven by Merri-Todd Webster

My Blue Heaven (M/K, M/Sc, M/Sk; rated PG-13 for language)  
Disclaimer: These characters belong to Chris Carter, 1013, and Fox, but I'm convinced they have more fun with me.  
Warnings & Spoilers: Vague spoilers for most everything from the pilot up through this season, but very vague. For those who love slash: Warning, this story contains references to m/f sex! For those who hate slash: Warning, this story contains references to m/m sex! For those who hate Scully: Warning, this story is a Scully pov!  
Thanks to JiM, Dreamerlea, and Virg Vaughn for having a look at this and ncouraging me to keep going with it.

* * *

My Blue Heaven  
by Merri-Todd Webster  
(2/4/00)

Of course I know Mulder's gay. I've always known.

"Not gay in the sense that I'm only attracted to men--I'm not--but gay in the sense that I think I do better at relationships with men."

That's what he told me on our first case together, when he also told me his sister had been abducted by aliens. It took a lot more nerve to tell me the latter than the former. Even in the FBI, believing in alien abductions is a lot worse than being homosexual.

I remember how scared I was when I barged into his room that night. Sometimes I wish I could be that scared of anything again, could act that impulsively again. I felt those bumps on my back, down in the small of my back where I couldn't see them in the mirror--cheap motel, no full-length mirror in the room--and I went running to Mulder, to have him take a look at them and tell me if they were the same as the marks on the girl's back. I had to know.

I barged into his room, dropped my bathrobe, and stood there in my bra and panties, my naked back hanging out. And Mulder touched me, gently, looked at me, carefully, and said they were just mosquito bites. I was relieved, but a little disappointed. Relieved that they were just mosquito bites; disappointed that, well, he hadn't *noticed* me.

I was scared, but not *that* scared.

An hour and a half later, I was feeling really sorry that he was more interested in men than in women, because he was not only good-looking in an unconventional kind of way, he was very intelligent, if very eccentric, and definitely one of the most fascinating men I'd ever met.

He smiled shyly up at me; he was sitting on the floor by the bed, and I was lying on the bed on my stomach. "My relationships with women have been, well, pretty shitty." The smile widened fractionally into a grin. "I like 'em strong, but I seem to pick 'em a little *too* strong. Men are less... complicated."

I went back to bed, finally, thinking, Well, even if he finds you attractive, he's not gonna bite, Dana, because you're just too strong and too complicated.

In a way, that wasn't true. Never have I got the impression from Mulder that I'm too strong, too bitchy. Even when I am, on occasion. He tolerates bitchiness extremely well, and demonstates it far less frequently than the gay men I had known up to that point. He can play the queen, but when he gets nasty, he's all butch.

How do I explain the way Mulder's rubbed off on me? Before I met him, I would never have used such language. I was a good Catholic girl who wasn't supposed to acknowledge "normal" people's sexuality, let alone sexual deviance. I was supposed to want a man because he could give me children, not because the act that conceives a child is so intensely pleasurable. And I have to admit that I pretty much played by the rules I'd been taught. Not that I was saving myself for marriage or anything, but I was so career-oriented, first interested in pathology, then thrilled to have been tapped by the FBI, that it was all too easy to ignore the sexual side of my personality and of everyone else's.

But as Mulder and I became friends, as well as partners, I found myself invited into a world I'd heard about, but never visited. First it was just evenings at my place, talking about our cases and then about anything, everything--and I mean everything. Mulder must have known he was titillating me with stories about his latest find--his latest conquest, really, but he never used that word--and what they'd done in bed, or in the car, or in the men's room, for heaven's sake. I was shocked, at first, but I was also, well, turned on. I already knew I had kind of a crush on Mulder, a sexual crush, not a romantic one. But I'd never really had a gay friend before, a man who would let it all hang out in front of me, so to speak. Even my girlfriends never did--they thought I was too much of a prude. Mulder never held anything back. Evenings at my place turned into dinner out, followed by a couple of hours in a bar, and we'd both kind of comment on what men we found attractive. And then I found myself going with him sometimes to gay bars--and lesbian bars, too--meeting some of his friends, learning the lingo, and seeing men come onto him, and vice versa. And learning to cope with femme lesbians batting their eyelashes at me, dying for me to be their butch. One night with a woman and I'd never go back.

Yeah, right. Not when I was going home wet as the ocean and jilling off thinking about Mulder and his latest beauty. He corrupted me pretty thoroughly, thank God.

The funny thing about Mulder is that he likes the same physical type, whether it's a man or a woman. Tall, slim, and dark, with light eyes, clear eyes, not brown. Not the Mediterranean brunette, but the Black Irish or Welsh look, dark hair, fair skin, light eyes.

Phoebe Green. Diana Fowley. Alex Krycek. All cast from the same mold, in more ways than one.

When I first met Alex Krycek, he was a young geek in a really bad suit who was looking green from his collar up to the roots of his slicked-down hair, and not because he was inexperienced, either. I'm sorry, but pathologists tend to be contemptuous of normal people with normal feelings who are bothered by dead, dismembered bodies. It's an occupational hazard. So I wasn't very impressed by him.

I figured Mulder hated the guy. Mulder and I had made such a good team; our closure rate was very high, even if our AD didn't always believe Mulder's version of what happened, and we'd made real progress in uncovering the cover-up lurking behind so many of our X-Files; then Mulder's informant gets killed, our division gets closed, and we get separated. We were like two hunting hounds who always run together, two horses who always pull in the same harness, feeling lonely and useless apart, and here was Mulder saddled with this inexperienced nerd. I'd forgotten that *I* was an inexperienced nerd not so long ago, and someone Mulder figured had been assigned to spy on him. I didn't like Krycek horning in.

Then there was the night we were hanging out at Farinelli's, one of Mulder's favorite bars, and Krycek came in.

Mulder recognized him. I didn't, not until he answered to his name and came over to our table. Hair falling down over his face, making it look harder and softer at the same time. Black leather jacket over a snug forest-green shirt and tight, *tight* black denim jeans. I don't know h ow he managed to walk in them. But when he bent over to tie his shoelace, Mulder and I both goggled at his butt. And laughed silently at each other.

If we'd only known.

It was pretty obvious that Krycek hadn't expected to find us here, but he relaxed, picked up on Mulder's signals that Mulder was interested and I was just visiting. I could see plenty of signals from Krycek that the interest was mutual. We all three got to talking over the case they were working on--this was after the Augustus Cole case, but well before I was abducted--and lubricating the conversation with alcohol. Well, I was well lubricated, in more ways than one. Eventually Mulder drove me home, which he'd agreed to do before we went. He'd only had two beers, followed by a pitcher of iced tea.

I sat in his car and grinned at him. Three whole glasses of wine had made me downright lascivious and totally indiscreet. "Soooo, where are you meeting Alex?"

He put on an innocent look. "Meeting Alex? Why would I want to do that?"

"So you can suck his brains out through his dick, probably." Dirty language, I know, but I really was snookered. Low body weight, low tolerance for alcohol. And I knew Mulder wouldn't be offended--he got a kick out of having corrupted me.

"Why, Miz Scully, I oughta wash out your mouth with soap." He affected a falsetto voice and a bad Southern accent vaguely reminiscent of Butterfly McQueen.

"No, I think it's your mouth'll need to be washed out later...." I was slurring my words. Only with Mulder would I feel safe enough to get this drunk.

He laughed at me, gently, not offended, saw me safely in the door, kissed me goodnight as he usually did, and then went off to meet Alex, hopefully at his place or the other man's and not in some alley. But I was too drunk to worry about that and fell asleep without getting all my clothes off, let alone my makeup. Ugh.

They were going at it hot and heavy for a while, and I was getting cheap thrills hearing about it. I wasn't clear if there were any real feelings involved, other than honest mutual lust, but they had plenty of that. I seem to recall that Mulder was having his first experiences with, uh, topping, and finding it more fun than he had expected.

Then it all went to hell on the Duane Barry case. I was abducted and lost three months that I've never really gotten back. I have some memories of... something, but I don't know how reliable they are. Mulder found out what a rotten little bastard Krycek was, Krycek disappeared, and somewhere in those three months, Mulder had sex with a woman for the first time in several years.

He told me about it, later, after I was out of the hospital. He acted like I was the priest and he was the penitent confessing a particularly disgusting sin. He actually felt more guilty about having had sex with a woman he barely knew than about having boffed a man for several months without noticing he was part of the great conspiracy we were trying to uncover. And oddly enough, I wanted to agree with him. His having sex with what's'ername *was* more of a blow than all the guys he'd blown since we'd become partners. You see, at that point, having just woken up from a three-month-long bad dream that I couldn't remember, I believed I was in love with Mulder.

I want to laugh at myself now. But I was so lonely then, so vulnerable, and Mulder, my beautiful bisexual Mulder, already the closest friend I'd ever had, was so tender, so helpful. He'd really missed me, really needed me, really cared. It showed, and I needed that. And one night that little good-night kiss evolved from a friendly peck on the lips into a serious oral tango, and neither of us had the strength to resist.

Maybe it would have been better for us, in the long run, if we had resisted. Our friendship, our real partnership, would never have suffered the stresses of breaking up as lovers. But at the time, we were head over heels, myself in particular. I didn't know yet that my abduction was going to lead to a life-threatening illness, or that it had already deprived me of the ability to bear children. I was in full carpe diem mode and actually thinking things like, Maybe I'll leave the Bureau eventually and go into pediatrics or something so we can get married, give Mom grandkids. That was when I wasn't thinking things like, Can I get him to do me right here in the office, on the desk?

Oh, my hormones were raging, a perfectly natural reaction to what was, essentially, a near-death experience, and Mulder was *good*. He was good in bed, he was good everywhere else that we did it. He was, for me, the best. With Mulder I found out why people *liked* sex so much. I'm ashamed to admit that I was largely inorgasmic before him. But I trusted him utterly, on the basis of our friendship and partnership, and I found myself able to let go in a way I hadn't before. And he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself. As he remarked one time, making a woman come five or six times has a certain cachet to it--it takes more skill and more work than making a man come once or twice. If nothing else, I was very good for his ego for a while there, and he needed that.

What went wrong? To this day, I can't really say. Maybe we were simply wrong for one another, as lovers. Maybe Mulder is more homosexual than he knew, up to then. Certainly my diagnosis of cancer was a big part of it. There was so much guilt and resentment tied up with my illness. I know I started pushing him away, in despair, convinced I was going to die and wanting desperately for him to stop blaming himself and keep on living. My memory of that time is not of things falling apart all at once, but of a slow destruction, a chip here, a chip there, a series of bumps and dents, little injuries that didn't get patched up. Sex got less and less frequent, and conversation with it. Mulder seemed to be getting more and more obsessed with Krycek, per se--the man kept turning up at the oddest moments--rather than with the conspiracy or the whereabouts of Samantha. And there was Skinner, our AD, and the disagreements we had over him--was he trustworthy, or not? Was he secretly our ally, secretly a spy for our enemies, or just a hard-nosed, hard-assed AD who had no idea what was really going on?

By the time I wound up in an alien freezer in Antarctica, abducted yet again in a futile attempt to throw Mulder off the trail--don't they ever learn?--we were behaving toward each other like people who are just waiting for the divorce to come through, the glorious day after which they'll never have to see each other again. I could cry now when I think of how consistently bitchy I was toward Mulder and how unfailingly if ironically courteous he was in return. I can never apologize enough. I remember thinking, just before I lost consciousness inside the alien cryogenic unit, that now I finally felt as cold on the outside as I had felt on the inside for a long time, and that was just fine by me....

I think that, for Mulder, his being able to rescue me from Antarctica made up for his not being able to rescue me when I was abducted before. Also, there was no more waffling on my part: I had *not* been unconscious all the way from Mulder's place to Antarctica. I knew very well that I was in a huge place that was not of human origin; I saw some of my captors, and while some of them were human, some of them were not. I could even have guessed it was a spaceship, if I hadn't been knocked out by the cold so quickly. Once things settled down again at work and the X-Files were re-opened--again--I felt like Mulder and I were once again pulling in harness. Whether I bought his theories about every single case or not, I knew that the ultimate enemy was just what Mulder had always said it was. It made working together a lot easier.

After Antarctica we were friends again. We didn't go back to being lovers. I had learned, finally, that while I loved Mulder deeply (and he loved me, without question), and was sexually infatuated with him as well, those two things weren't really connected. There was a cleavage between the love and the infatuation that could never be mended, and it wouldn't have been there if I were really, genuinely in love with him, in love in the way that you hope leads to marriage and permanence. On the other hand, I trusted more and more that our relationship *was* permanent, that we weren't going to disappear out of one another's lives even if we found True Love with somebody else.

Not that it was easy, being only friends and partners again when we had been lovers, too. Not that it was easy, watching Mulder break his heart over Krycek again as Krycek started passing back and forth over the line between our two camps, now playing his own game, now helping our cause. It was even harder when Diana Fowley popped up out of nowhere, dripping smarm all over everything and just about costing Mulder his life in the end. Another woman brought out all my possessive streak in a way that another man didn't, and I behaved pretty shamefully over Fowley. It put a strain on our friendship, but we'd weathered worse. Ultimately, I was right about her, and Mulder acknowledged that, so I felt like I'd won after all. Poor woman, I felt so little genuine grief over her death that I made myself light candles and say prayers for her for a long time, just as I did for poor Jeffrey Spender and his mother Cassandra and sweet Agent Pendrell. She had suffered, too, and she hadn't been able to come between Mulder and me no matter how hard she tried. I didn't think, after the business with Fowley, that anything could come between us.

When Mulder finally told me, after the Consortium was exposed once and for all and he had resigned from the Bureau, that he had gotten I nvolved with Skinner, I was actually relieved. Okay, first I was pissed that he hadn't told me sooner. They'd been seeing each other for a while before Mulder, his face red, broke the news. But why should I have disapproved, which he was obviously afraid of? Walter had been just as cruelly used by the past ten years as we had; in the end, there was no question that he was on our side. And he wasn't, after all, one of those dangerous types, with the black hair and light eyes and black, black hearts underneath. He was so *not* Mulder's type that I was hugely relieved, to tell the truth. Mulder was better off with me and with Walter, the people who *weren't* his type. And I knew that Walter would never be jealous of my friendship with Mulder, never try to drive me out of Mulder's life or think that we were carrying on behind his back. He was perhaps the only person who could understand the bond that held us together; in a way he was part of the bond because he'd been through some of the experiences that had forged it.

No, it was going to be very comfortable. I knew that the first Christmas I spent over at their house. I persuaded my mother to come along, since Charlie and Bill were both out to sea. She was amazingly, wonderfully blase about being the guest of two gay men who were obviously crazy about each other, and I was proud of her. We all exchanged gifts and stuffed ourselves with food and eggnog and listened to Christmas music and had a great time.

I'm not really worried about meeting someone and getting married, to tell you the truth. It'd be nice, but having the place to yourself is also nice. Being able to eat ice cream for dinner when you want to is nice. Not having to please anybody but yourself is nice. And knowing that your best friend is just a phone call away is very nice. I had pneumonia a few months ago, and I stayed with Mulder and Walter the whole time. They looked after me and made sure I got all my meds. Mulder even bought me a beanie baby to keep me company while I was sick, a little tie-dyed beanbag bear. He sits on my bed now, or on the kitchen counter when I'm cooking. Mulder was teasing me when I was sick, trying to distract me, and he sang, "Just Walter and me, and Scully makes three. We're happy in my... blue... heaven."

Yeah. I'm happy.

***

end


End file.
